Focus

This report presents the initial results of the Survey of Adult Skills (PIACC), which evaluates the skills of adults in 22 OECD member countries and 2 partner countries. The survey provides insights into the availability of some key skills and how they are used.

Unemployment rose sharply in many countries in the wake of the global financial crisis that broke out in 2008 and has been very slow to recede, placing employment policy high on the agenda of governments.

‌In January 2016, the OECD Labour and Employment Ministers invited the OECD to review and update the OECD Jobs Strategy to provide comprehensive and up-to-date policy advice for achieving an inclusive labour market that performs strongly in the context of demographic change, environmental challenges, globalisation, ongoing technological progress and changes in work organisation. The new OECD Jobs Strategy will be a key pillar of the OECD Inclusive Growth initiative since labour market outcomes are crucial for ensuring the strength but also the inclusivity and social sustainability of the process of economic growth.

Projects on employment

The world of work is in flux as a result of digitalisation, the development of the digital economy and broad technological change. These processes, coupled with globalisation, population ageing and changes in work organisation, will shape the world of work and raise challenges to public policy in unknown ways.

Most people spend a substantial amount of time at work, and work for a significant part of their life. But what are the features of job quality that affect well-being? The OECD framework for measuring and assessing job quality considers three objective and measurable dimensions of job quality.

OECD governments increasingly recognise that policy has a major role to play in keeping people with mental health problems in employment and helping them to perform at work, in bringing those outside of the labour market into it or back to it, and in preventing mental illness at all ages.

Job displacement is the involuntary job loss due to firm closure or downsizing and it affects many workers over the course of their working lives. Helping displaced workers get back into good jobs quickly should be a key goal of labour market policy.‌

Giving older people better work incentives and choices is crucial in the context of rapid population ageing and pressures on the sustainability of public social expenditures. We are carrying out a new review of policies to encourage greater labour market participation by fostering employability, job mobility and labour demand.

The objective of an effective activation policy for jobseekers and other disadvantaged groups of the population is to bring more people into the labour force and into jobs by ensuring motivation and incentives, increasing employability and expanding employment opportunities.

This series of seminars is open to both external and internal speakers. It is intended to be an informal forum for discussion on policy-oriented empirical research among policy-makers, academics and OECD staff.